Robochameleon is a coding framework and component library for simulation and experimental analysis of optical communication systems. It has been developed by the members of the DSP section of the High Speed Optical Communication group of the Technical University of Denmark (DTU), which I’m currently part of. The framework library includes models for many standard optical components used to build coherent and incoherent optical communication systems and also different DSP blocks to perform data analysis.

We’ve realized that many researchers around the world are spending their precious time in writing code to model already established optical communication systems components, thus subtracting time to the research that can push the optical communications even further. Indeed, many different optical communication groups around the world are using their own closed-source hand-made optical simulation framework (beside the ones that are using commercial solutions). We think that having a common tool that can be used by everyone and which can be improved and checked by everyone, will allow to minimize the time spent on code maintenance, will allow the code to reach an high level of quality faster and possibly can also guaranteed more transparency on the published data.

Robochameleon framework is not yet perfect, but I hope that people will start using it, and will contribute to it in order to make it a a solid tool for the optical communication community, eventually.